Mike Butcher

Mike Butcher is the Editor-At-Large of TechCrunch. Mike is also involved in a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment called TechHub, in London initially.

A long time journalist, Mike has written for U.K. national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. He is a former editor of New Media Age magazine, the leading new media weekly in the UK, and the European edition of The Industry Standard magazine.

Since 1996 he has launched numerous media web sites and in 2000 he was nominated as NetMedia's European Internet Journalist of the Year. In 2004 he was voted ""One of the 100 Innovators of the UK Internet Decade"" by GfK NOP, the fourth-largest custom research business in the world. In July 2008 he was put at No. 47 out of the Top 100 people in London's creative industry by The Independent newspaper and The Hospital Club. In August 2008 TechCrunch Europe was awarded the best ""Web 2.0 and business blog"" in the U.K., by the readers of Computer Weekly magazine. In 2009 it was named as one of the Top 10 blogs out of the U.K.

Also in 2009 he was named one of the Top 10 bloggers on Twitter in the U.K. In October 2009 he was named one of the Top 50 most influential Britons in technology by The Daily Telegraph. In April 2010 he was named as one of Britain's Top 100 ""digital power-brokers"" by Wired UK magazine. In November 2010 he was named as one of London's most influential people in New Media and ""king of dotcom commentators"" by The Evening Standard Newspaper. In February he was listed as one of the Top 100 most influential people on Twitter in the UK. He has spoken at the prestigious Monaco Media Forum and Le Web, among many other conferences. Mike is a regular commentator on the technology business, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4, and Bloomberg.

Latest from Mike Butcher

Europe: Germany’s Burda media group has invested “several million dollars” in a Canadian social networking startup called Nexopia which claims to be Canada’s largest social networking site for youth, writes AlarmClock. It has 1.2 million registered members and a billion impressions a month. Burda Digital Ventures, the venture capital arm of Hubert Burda Media made… Read More

Ireland is well known for its technology industries, but lately there seems to be some discontent amongst entrepreneurs there that the tax-incentives created by the government to attract overseas tech businesses – particularly US firms – are not nurturing home-grown talent. Recently it emerged that the The Digital Hub, an incubation space for tech development, had 55 desk… Read More

People: Reevoo, the customer reviews aggregator, has apointed Kyle McGinn as Chief Technology Officer. McGinn joins Reevoo from the Siemens/BBC technology partnership, where he was Head of Internet Technology. He will lead one of the the UK’s largest Ruby on Rails development team who have already released open-source initiatives such as mocha, uformats and the Ruby nabaztag library. As… Read More

Some interesting figures from Hitwise on a combined Microsoft/Yahoo impact on the UK. According to HItwise Microsoft has a dominant market share with its Hotmail service in the UK, while Gmail has been flat for the last few months. Last week the combined market share of the Microsoft and Yahoo! services was 13 times that of Google.
Google’s market share in News services is… Read More

European venture capital firms are backing the fewest companies on record, according to VentureBeat. They invested in just 897 companies last year, the lowest number since 1999. However, more money is going into fewer startups, reaching €4.56 billion, a two percent rise from 2006, and the fourth year of consecutive increase. Obviously this is all VC (so Cleantech etc etc), not just Web or… Read More

Amsterdam-based IM service eBuddy has raised €6.5 million in a Series B round of funding led by Prime Technology Ventures this week. The company had previously raised €5 million from Lowland capital. eBuddy will use the investment capital for serious growth and expansion into the UK and have already established a small office in London and have a small sales staff on the ground here. Read More

UK-based Liveaps has a drag’n’drop page webpage builder currently in private beta prior to a launch late Feb/early March. Think online Dreamweaver for creative peple who want to build a site visually. In addition to the drag’n’drop web page builder it has tools supporting text, images, lines, shapes, hyperlinks, multimedia files, and html widgets. The back-end has… Read More

AOL has acquired buy.at, a leading affiliate marketing network backed by VC house DFJ Esprit. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but well-placed sources say the deal is worth in the region of £75 million ($150 million). Although launched in the UK buy.at now has a growing US operation, which is what attracted AOL’s interest. Buy.at is the fifth advertising company AOL… Read More

Utterz, a US-based site that you post to your blog or social network with voice, video, picture, and text, has launched a version of the site for the UK and across 16 other countries. The site is also launching ‘conversational threading’ capabilities, which lets people reply to Utterz with messages of any combination of voice, video, picture and text. Users either record a… Read More

BREAKING NEWS: Apple just released a statement saying the iPhone now comes in a new 16GB model for £329 (inc VAT), joining the 8GB model for £269 (inc VAT). The iPod touch now comes in a 32GB model for £329 (inc VAT), joining the 16GB model for £269 (inc VAT) and the 8GB model for £199 (inc VAT). My take on this is that this is not the move which will convince more UK consumers, who are… Read More

MySpace UK is having a launch party in London this Thursday (7th February) to get developers to talk about the launch of their new applications platform over a few beers at a swanky London location. And TechCrunch UK has been given 15 exclusive invitations to promote to the community. Speaking at the event will be MySpace CTO, Aber Whitcomb and Senior President of Technology, Jim Benedetto. Read More

The Plugg Web/Mobile tech startups conference in Brussels in March is offering 25% discount to TechCrunch readers which will knock off 25% (or 100 €) off the entrance fee for the event, valid until the date of the conference, taking the early-bird price to 300 €. The deadline to get in before the price goes up to 400 € is 23rd of February. The discount code you can use is sweet and… Read More

Maybe mydeco’s strategy of releasing their whole strategy and site to the press all on the one day (the world’s, blogs, media and TechCrunch combined) was not such a good idea after all. I have been trying since yesterday to reach deep links into the site, but most appear to have a polite “try again later” message (pictured), reminiscent of Twitter’s usual… Read More

The UK’s Church of England has launched a so-called social-networking campaign to encourage people to discuss how they can make the world a better place during Lent. The campaign site, livelent.net has more info but someone needs to tell these people that there is more to it than throwing up a few groups on Facebook, MySpace and Flickr (their group is empty). Perhaps they should talk to… Read More

AOL has acquired buy.at, a leading affiliate marketing network backed by VC house DFJ Esprit, reports TechCrunch UK. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but well-placed sources say the deal is worth in the region of $150 million (£75 million). Although launched in the UK in 2002, buy.at now has a much bigger US operation, which is what attracted AOL’s interest. buy.at will… Read More

MySpace launches an applications platform to compete with Facebook today at developer.myspace.com. Although MySpace signed up to Google’s OpenSocial project, it’s own platform will have MySpace-specific “extensions”.
From today, there will be a one month application development period allowing developers to build and test their apps without them being available to… Read More

I feel now I can sleep well at night, secure in the knowledge that no less a body than the BBC has now pronounced upon one of the great questions of our time. How to actually say “Web 2.0″. Since two thirds of 500 BBC people surveyed internally think it should be “two point oh”, and ZDNet produced the same result last year, that seems to have settled the matter. However… Read More

Several years after everyone else pointed out what they could do with their multimedia devices, the mobile carriers are waking up to the idea that users do not want to have to silo their “generated content” in mobile video portals owned by one operator and which have no incentive for them to generate the content in the first place.
So today, 3 and O2 dragged journalists down to… Read More

After selling the UK’s first, quintessential Web startup, Lastminute.com, to Travelocity in May 2005 for £577m ($1.1bn dollars), some might have forgiven co-founder Brent Hoberman for kicking back and enjoying his rumoured £26m payday. But Hoberman has done anything but that, remaining an active seed investor in the UK startup scene (most recently MoveMe). But the real question was… Read More

mydeco.com, a new UK-based home decor intermediary with some innovative interior decorating tools, launches today with backing from a who’s who of European investors, reports TechCrunch UK. Mydeco is the latest startup for UK founder and executive chairman Brent Hoberman since he exited from Lastminute.com via a sale to Travelocity in May 2005 for $1.1bn dollars.
Around 500 retailers… Read More